They Carry Rivers

 (For the women who hold entire worlds within them)

Some women are carved from quiet storms.

They move like rivers beneath the earth,

carrying stories that were never written,

only breathed into bone.

They are fragments of many histories,

stitched into a single pulse.

No map could chart them,

no single name could contain them.

There are those who rise with trembling hands

and steady hearts,

stepping forward into shadows

even when their knees remember the weight of fear.

Their strength does not roar;

it breathes...

soft, unshaken,

like roots gripping stone in the hush of winter.

Even the wind bends around them,

knowing what they carry

cannot be undone.

Some women create from what the world has broken.

They gather remnants 

scents, pigments, textures, fragments of light 

and rebuild belonging from their palms outward.

Perfumed oils steeped in memory,

wildflower journals written beneath quiet skies,

copper and amber pressed into jewelry

that hums like old songs.

They leave pieces of themselves wherever they go,

not to be claimed,

but to remind the earth

that beauty still blooms after ruin.

Others walk paths between worlds,

never entirely rooted in one.

They carry rivers in their veins...

Manahoac currents, Lenape echoes,

Haudenosaunee soil beneath their skin,

Moroccan salt winds tangled in their breath,

Portuguese tides humming at their feet,

Welsh mist settled in their chest.

They are the bridges between what was

and what will come,

restless yet anchored,

always belonging everywhere

and nowhere all at once.

And some women learn

that softness is not surrender.

They are petals edged in thorns,

mountains hollowed by fire yet standing still.

They carry grief and longing in the same breath,

and somehow make room for both.

They do not break when the world says they should.

Instead, they bend like willow branches,

sweeping low enough to touch the ground,

rising taller after every storm.

There is a thread between them

unseen, unspoken,

but older than memory.

It glows like embers beneath the skin,

quiet but impossible to extinguish.

It is what holds their breath steady

when silence becomes heavy,

what drives their hands

to create, to love, to endure.

And if someone asks

how women like this survive,

the answer is not found in words,

but in the way they keep moving...

By carrying ancestral fire in their bodies,

and shaping it into something

the wind can never take away.